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Monthly Archives: September 2012

Last year, I wrote a post explaining how my students were creating tutorials to demonstrate their learning, mainly in mathematics. Students either took screen shots, inserted these images into a movie making app and then voice recorded over them, or they used the app Show Me Interactive Whiteboard.

This year, some students have continued to use Show Me Interactive Whiteboard. Many, however, have moved onto using Explain Everything. Explain Everything offers many more features, including the ability to add additional slides and export to the camera roll.

At present, my students are continuing to create math tutorials. They are also using this app to publish explanation and procedural texts in writing, as well as to explain concepts and systems in science.

In the past, my students kept their tutorials on their own iPads, sharing their work with me when prompted. Now, my students upload their work to the ‘tutorials’ folder in our shared class folder in Dropbox. My students really enjoy watching and listening to the different ways they each learn.

Earlier this year, I followed the hashtag thread from a conference via Twitter. Alan November was the keynote. He said something that really resonated with me:

“We are very good at asking students to create tutorials to demonstrate their learning, but what are we doing with them?”

As a result, I’ve now created a separate folder where I’ve placed the best examples from my students. I plan to use these next year, if I teach in the same year level again, to front load students in a way similar to a flipped classroom. The main difference will be that these tutorials have been created for students, by students, using what I call “kid speak”, as opposed to “teacher talk”. I also plan to place these tutorials on the school server for other year levels to access because sharing is caring 🙂

Last year, my class and I explored the use of Dropbox as a means of sharing files, rather than emailing back and forth. We set up a class account and everyone used the same log on details to access the same folder. That worked well, but this year, I wanted to set up things a little differently, so each student had their own space to upload and back up work to. As a result, I set up a number of folders, one being the main class folder that everyone has access to; the remaining being individual student folders that are only accessible by that student and myself. Each student has their own Dropbox login, so ultimately, they have two shared folders, as well as any other folders they’ve created to back up their work. This has been a lifesaver on many occasions, particularly when students have had to restore their iPads. I will admit it did take time to set things up and individually invite each student to their shared folder, but in the end, I believe this arrangement has made accessing student work more manageable.

In hindsight, I would invite my students to their shared folders first, before their accounts have been set up, so I’d receive additional storage. With a class of 24 students, this equates to, potentially, an extra 6gb of space (250mb per new user).

Earlier this year, the grade 6s went on an excursion into the city to explore different art forms and styles, as this was the focus for our inquiry unit. Our students are very creative this year, so we decided to embrace and explore this by opening up to the students experiences they may not have yet had, i.e. seeing street art, observing aboriginal art, visiting an art gallery.

It was amazing to see our students with their iPads out, snapping pictures and, when connected to the free wi-fi at Federation Square, exploring artists and art works.

Although our students mainly used their iPads on the day to take photos of art they liked, as well as to capture moments with peers, it made the sorting out of the experience back at school quite rich. Students had a selection of images to refer to, to personally relate with, to analyse more closely and to refresh memories. They were able to engage in conversations with peers about the features of the art pieces based upon the images in front of them, not just from memory. They were able to then explore more art pieces in the same style, by the same artist or from the same period, to compare the similarities and differences. Students were able to investigate stories behind some of the pieces and present all of their findings in an interesting way. The iPads were definitely a tool that enabled our students to capture, explore, analyse, collaborate and create.

Following on from our class experts, my “iLearning” program was further developed. I had introduced iPlay and iPortfolios to my students last year and decided to expand this concept to cover more ways to promote thinking, creativity and collaboration.

iCreate

iCreate began as a way of embracing my students’ creativity. I was truly amazed by the brilliant constructions my students were producing in Minecraft. One of my students had been home sick for a couple of days and emailed through to me some dinosaurs she had constructed to cheer up her younger sister, who was also home sick with her. During the same week, another student had shared with me some work she had completed in an app called PicCollage. This app wasn’t on our school list, it was one she had found herself. I was surprised by how professional her work looked, in terms of layout, balance, text and image size, etc. Having an art and ICT background myself, it was clear that this student was a natural in considering the elements of design in her work. I also had a number of students in my class who played musical instruments, so they enjoyed tinkering in Garageband, as well as a student who was very keen on movie making. With such a creative class, it was obvious I had to do something to show I valued and was impressed by such talents.

iDiscuss

iDiscuss was formed because I wanted a space for my students to interact and respond to individual posts. I had a class blog last year and I loved the way my students commented on posts that were made. One downfall I found, though, was that on all of the pages, other than my home page, there was only one comment box at the bottom of the page. This, in my mind, defeated the purpose of responding to posts. I say this because I wanted my students’ comments to particular posts to be clearly identifiable. In the comment boxes on these pages, you needed to scroll down to read what was written.

This year I explored the discussion tool on wikispaces. It was easy to embed, yet my students needed to sign up to wikispaces and become a member of our class wikispace. Due to learning and teaching content being placed on our class wikispace, I decided this wasn’t the way I wanted to go – I didn’t want my students to accidentally delete information. I know I could have protected pages, I just hoped there was another option. I spent a while searching embeddable discussion tools and eventually came across one I liked – Nabble.

Nabble offers free access to discussion tools; however, after a trial period, a subscription is required if you don’t want advertisements displayed. For $25 for the year, I didn’t mind paying to remove the advertisements.

To date, my students enjoy responding to my posts. I now intend to open the discussion topics up to my students in order to cater for ideas and interests.

iExplore

Last year I encouraged my students to explore the internet in order to pursue personal curiousities. I occasionally posted links and infographics on our Discovery Learning page in order to spark discussions and initiate interest. This worked really well, so this year I repackaged this concept as iExplore.

iPoll

iPoll came about as a result of listening to my students and respecting their “voice”. At the end of term 1, I posted a poll to see if my students wanted holiday homework. Of course, they didn’t 🙂 What they did want, though, was the opportunity to continue to vote on a range of topics selected by either them or me.

This data is real as it reflects my students’ responses. During our ‘Data’ unit in mathematics, we analysed these results. We looked at the different ways the data was graphed, we discussed which graphs were easier to read and questioned why the results were presented as percentages. During our ‘Sustainability‘ unit, we also hypothesised why litter is such a problem at our school, based upon the results presented.

Collecting data through this means has proved to be a rich learning experience for my students. It has also provided my class and my school with real data about a range of topics.

iQuote

Throughout my day, I often find myself sharing quotes and sayings with my students. These are shared to support what we’ve been learning or in response to an incident that’s happened. A class discussion follows where we unpack the meaning they take from the quote or saying and how it relates to the situation at hand.

Some of my students have really been inspired by this and have come to school with their own quotes and sayings to share with the class. Sometimes these are shared just before a recess break and sometimes they are shared at the end of the day as a way to promote thinking and reflection.

In some ways, I often think we overlook the messages and lessons we can learn from quotes, sayings, proverbs, etc. That is why I created the iQuote page on my class wiksipace, to expose my students more to thinking about their thinking.

Let’s rewind to the start of the year… many of my students entered my classroom with very little experience with iPads. A number of students had received their iPads for Christmas, some had only received their iPads the week before school started. A handful of students had managed to install a few of the free apps from the list they received at the end of last year, some students hadn’t set up an iTunes account so they didn’t have any apps, other than the default ones, installed. Then there were a couple of students who didn’t have an iPad yet. This was very different to my experience at the start of 2011 where my students had been using school owned iPads for 4 to 5 months with all apps required to support learning installed.

At the start of this year, as a way to cater for these different entry points, my students spent a lot of time exploring apps, working together, sharing discoveries and peer coaching each other. When it came time to complete tasks, we discussed possible apps to use and how to use them. We established class experts, that is, students who were familiar with particular apps and were happy to share their knowledge and skills. Students created tutorials, or rather “how-to” guides, for particular apps, to document this. We also had a daily “share time” where students communicated something they’d learnt about an app. It was fantastic to see my class establish a collaborative work ethic from the very beginning where they accepted we were all learning together, including me. I think that is one of the most important things to accept and value when establishing a 1:1 mobile device learning environment – that the teacher (adult) isn’t the bearer of all knowledge, that we can only build on what we know if we are open to learning together.